Flash in the Peg

If you’d like to examine the sample files that I used for last night’s meeting, feel free to download them and use them as you wish.

Our next meeting is all set: Thursday, January 24 at 7:00 p.m. We’ll be meeting in our usual location, room W411 of Red River College, Princess Street Campus.

At this meeting we’ll take our first look at the Spry framework for developing Ajax-powered web pages. Ajax is a way of method of developing responsive, interactive web sites using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It’s the backbone of a lot of those fancy new Web 2.0 sites you’ve been visiting.

Spry is an Ajax framework. It simplifies the process of building Ajax-powered sites by proving a set of ready-to-use widgets, visual effects, and data APIs to greatly improve the speed with which you can develop a web site.

We’ll jump into Spry by looking at some of the widgets and visual effects available (at a later meeting we’ll take a look at the data APIs). I’ll show you some of these elements in action and walk through the process of implementing Spry elements on a web site.

(If you already have Dreamweaver CS3, the Spry widgets are built in. You can also download them from Adobe Labs.)

Also, as I mentioned in an email before our previous meeting, we’ll be holding our biannual software draw. The winner gets the Adobe software package of their choice valued at up to US $2100! If you’ve attended one of the last three meetings, wrote a book review, or presented at one of those meetings, you’ve earned raffle tickets. But remember: you have to be present on January 24 for the draw in order to win!

(You may recall that back in September I sent out an email with the rules for these raffles; if you’d like another copy of that, let me know. Since those rules weren’t established until September, I’m only counting meetings held after that email towards the draw. If you’re interested in how many raffle tickets you may have earned, send me a private email and I can let you know.)

In addition to the software raffle, we’ll have our usual draw for books, shirts, and other goodies.

As always, please drop me a note to let me know if you plan to attend.

Thanks to everyone who attended our meeting this week. For those who missed it, Clayton gave a great presentation on using XML in Flash. He was also kind enough to provide the sample files.

Our next meeting is set for Thursday, December 13th, at 7:00 p.m., room W411, Red River College, Princess Street campus.

Clayton Wilchowy, Senior Interactive Designer at Manlab, will give a presentation on how to use ActionScript to load data from an XML file and put that data to use in a Flash project. To demonstrate how to do this, Clayton will make a Flash file showing Canada, which populates itself with citizens of different shapes and sizes that display speech balloon comments when you roll over them. All of the citizen data will be pulled in from the XML file. Clayton’s presentation will include:

• What is XML?
• Best practices for structuring your XML file
• Loading and parsing the XML file using ActionScript
• Debugging your code
• Putting the data to use in the Flash project
• Web services, RSS feeds, and other examples of data structures, and how they can be ‘Flashed up’.

And of course, there will be prizes! This will also be your last chance to earn tickets for the software raffle. (Since December can be a busy month, the raffle itself will be held at our first meeting in 2008; remember, you have to be present for the raffle to win.)

Please RSVP to let me know if you’ll be attending. I hope to see you all out on the 13th!

Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move is a new edition of Keith Peters’ Foundation ActionScript Animation. The main difference, implicit in the title, is that the code in the new edition has been updated to use ActionScript 3 in Adobe Flash CS3 Professional.

If you’re familiar with Keith Peters and the tutorials on his bit-101 blog, you’ll have some idea of the kinds of things covered in this book. Creating animation with ActionScript is all about math, and this book dives right in. Peters’ writing style is clean and direct. Even if you’re not comfortable with math, difficult concepts are explained clearly and simply. I already have other books on my shelf devoted just to physics and trigonometry, but “Making Things Move” comes very close to replacing those altogether by with its effective explanations of the concepts behind the code.

After the introductory chapters, which include an AS3 primer (more on that below), Peters begins by covering the most basic type of animation. Subsequent chapters build on the foundation created by the previous chapters. As new concepts and formulas are introduced, what started out as a simple ball moving across the screen becomes something much more sophisticated. In a relatively short period of time, you’ll have multiple objects zipping around the stage, colliding and interacting with one another. Seeing those basic elements repeated and tweaked helps reinforce what you learned earlier on.

This edition follows the same well-structured format as the previous edition. Each chapter covers just the right amount of material, so you never feel like you’re taking in too much at a time. Like any good book on programming, it encourages and rewards a leisurely pace. Simply running the sample code to see what it does before moving on to the next section will teach you something, but it won’t exhaust what you can get out of this book. Peters points out where you can experiment with the code, suggesting values that you can change to see what effect it has on the animation. Playing around with the sample code will deepen your understanding of what’s happening, so it’s worth taking your time.

As I mentioned earlier, the book opens with a short primer on ActionScript 3.0. If you’re at all familiar with Object-Oriented Programming in ActionScript 2, the primer does a nice job of bringing you sufficiently up-to-date with what’s new/different in AS3 to help you get the most out of the book. If you’ve never done any OOP with ActionScript before, the chapter provides enough information to get you going, and you can use the framework Peters provides and concentrate on the animation.

(If you are familiar with AS2, and don’t see yourself making the jump to AS3 in the very near future, I’d recommend that you buy this book instead of the version specifically for AS2. The principles are the same, and the code can be ported to AS2. Plus, when you finally do start working with AS3, you’ll be ready to go.)

Besides what you’ll learn directly, this book is valuable for the ideas and inspiration it provides. I didn’t get very far into the book before I was adapting the code to work in my own projects, and also thinking of games and user interface elements that I could build around some of the concepts in the book. Just one such idea can repay your investment of time and money. All in all, if you have any interest in using ActionScript for animation, this book belongs in your library.

Our next meeting is scheduled for Thursday, November 1st, from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. As usual, we’ll meet in room W411, Red River College, Princess Street Campus. Our topic for this meeting is prototyping web sites using Adobe Fireworks CS3.

Lots of people think of Fireworks as just a simplified version of Photoshop. While you can use Fireworks as ‘Photoshop Lite’, if that’s all you do with it then you’re missing out.

One of Fireworks’ many features that set it apart is the ability to easily and rapidly prototype web site designs. Taking your design mockups from flat jpegs to an interactive prototype can help you test your design, and can help communicate your vision for the site to your client.

We’ll walk through the process of taking a site mockup from a Photoshop file to a working prototype using Fireworks’ new Pages feature. That’s right: we’re not saying goodbye to Photoshop. Fireworks CS3 is nicely integrated with Photoshop, so you can continue working in Photoshop to create your original design, then import that into Fireworks to build your prototype. (Fireworks is also great for creating mockups from scratch, and we’ll look at that, too).

Plus, we’ll also talk about some of the announcements that were made at MAX. You may have heard some of them already, but I thought it might be interesting to chat about a few of those, as well as my general impressions of the conference. I’ll send some links around next week if you want to read up before the meeting.

And of course there are prizes! Since this is the last meeting before the FITC Winnipeg Roadshow, it’s your last chance to win a free admission to the second day of the two-day event. We’ll also have a few other goodies to give away.

So I hope you can make it out! I’d appreciate it if your emailed me to let me know if you can attend. Personally, I think Fireworks is a great piece of software, and I hope you’ll see it in a new light after our next meeting!

The time and date of our next meeting is confirmed: Thursday, September 27, same time and place as our previous meetings. Please RSVP directly to me if you plan to attend.

You know what Flash is, and you have an idea of what you can do with Flash. Maybe you’ve even installed the free trial of Flash. But how do you get started? This meeting will help give you that little nudge you might need to jump in the pool.

We’ll take a look at the Flash development environment (both Flash 8 and CS3), run through some of the basic concepts behind Flash, and then I’ll demonstrate how to do a few things using Flash. The goal for this meeting is to give people who have never used Flash enough familiarity with it that they can download the Flash trial and not feel overwhelmed by it all. You’ll even know enough to be able to make your own First Flash Movie.

And for anybody who has used Flash in the distant past but not too recently, it will be a nice refresher. Hopefully this also will give you some grounding for future meetings which will delve a little deeper into Flash.

If you don’t want to wait and would like to get started right now, you can download a free trial of Flash CS3 and start playing around. If you’ve already done that, you might have some questions. If you do, send them to me in advance of the meeting and I’ll see what I can do to answer them!

As usual, we’ll have some goodies to give away, including a free admission to the FITC Winnipeg Roadshow in November. Your attendance will also improve your odds of winning the software raffle to be held at our December meeting, where you could win the Adobe software of your choice, up to a value of $2100 US.

Remember: let me know if you can make it, and especially if you have any Flash questions you’d like answered!

Thanks!
Darren

Adobe has posted an FAQ about Flash Media Server 3, and has also announced Audition 3 (here’s the link to the product page).

Adobe announced yesterday the launch of ColdFusion 8. Next week’s meeting will be a launch event to mark the occasion. Here’s what’s in store:

• We’ll watch a CF8 Deep Dive recorded specially for Adobe user groups by Ben Forta, Senior Technical Evangelist for Adobe.
• Prizes prizes prizes! One lucky person will win a copy of ColdFusion 8 Standard, valued at US $1299! We’ll also be raffling off a free admission to the FITC Winnipeg Roadshow, courtesy of FITC. And, there will be other little goodies to give away.
• Pizza and soft drinks will be provided.

The meeting is on Thursday, August 9, at 7:00 p.m., room W411, Red River College, Princess Street campus. If you can make it, please let me know by emailing me at darren@flashinthepeg.org so I can make sure there are enough refreshments for everyone.

I hope to see you next Thursday!

If you’re working in or interested in Adobe AIR, there’s a free e-book available that you might find helpful: Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) for JavaScript Developers Pocket Guide. You can read the book on-line, or download a pdf version.